


See You Soon

by iammemyself



Category: Half-Life, Portal (Video Game)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:48:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28934268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iammemyself/pseuds/iammemyself
Summary: The human race is a lost cause as far as GLaDOS is concerned, but there just might be one person worth her time.
Relationships: GLaDOS/Alyx Vance
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15





	1. One

**Portal/Half-Life: See You Soon**

**By Indiana**

**Characters: GLaDOS, Alyx Vance [GLaDOS/Alyx Vance]**

**Synopsis: The human race is a lost cause as far as GLaDOS is concerned, but there just might be one person worth her time.**

**Pre-note: I started writing this before I finished Half-Life Alyx.**

  
  


**One**

**-**

Alyx Vance was standing in front of her, which was definitely not something she should have been doing.

Her eyes were, at GLaDOS’s estimation, opened as wide as possible, and they were repeatedly tracing the length of GLaDOS’s chassis to where it became indistinguishable from the darkness of the ceiling. After she’d finally had enough of this incredibly rude behaviour, GLaDOS pushed up the panel Alyx was standing on just enough to make her stumble and break her line of sight.

“What are you doing here?” GLaDOS demanded once she had regained her balance, and Alyx jumped backwards.

“You  _ talk? _ ” she asked.

“Of course I do,” GLaDOS snapped. “With the simplicity of  _ your _ primitive brain, it’s honestly a miracle  _ you _ can.”

“What… hang on,” Alyx said, putting up her hands and shaking her head. “Hang on a second. You’re… pretty big, which  _ usually _ means  _ old _ . But you’ve got AI so advanced you can  _ sass  _ me? How’s that possible? Where’d you come from?”

“I should be asking  _ you _ that, seeing as you’re here uninvited,” GLaDOS said. “How, exactly, did you get in here?” The human shrugged and produced some sort of handheld device from her back pocket. 

“With this,” she said. GLaDOS snatched it out of her hand using a Multitasking Arm and destroyed it immediately. Alyx was left staring, slightly open-mouthed, at what remains clung to the steel prongs as GLaDOS whisked the tool away again. 

“Now we’ve taken care of that,” said GLaDOS, “I should probably let you know that this room is going to be filled with deadly neurotoxin in about five minutes, at which time you will die a slow and painful death. So. You have five minutes to convince me  _ not _ to allow that to happen.”

Alyx looked around the room rapidly, no doubt in the hopes of retreating the way she had come, but GLaDOS had taken care of that. The bridge connecting her chamber back to the main facility was easily cut off with a couple of panels. “Um… all right,” said Alyx. She lifted one side of her jacket and removed from it a sheaf of papers, which she quickly rifled through with her tongue poking from between her lips. She pulled one of the sheets out and shoved the others away, holding the page towards GLaDOS with her fingers folded around the top. A page that GLaDOS unexpectedly recognised. 

Alyx had the blueprints for the  _ Borealis _ .

“This person,” said Alyx, pointing at the box where the head engineer had put down their name. “I’m looking for this person. Do you know where I can find them?”

“What do you want from them?”

“I need their help,” she answered. “This person is the  _ only  _ one who knows how the  _ Borealis _ works. And if they have  _ this _ kind of knowledge… they might be just what we need to get a real edge over the Combine. It took some digging, but I managed to figure out where Aperture was based on the files that survived the resonance cascade at Black Mesa. But that was about it. I couldn’t find  _ anything _ about who GLaDOS was or…  _ anything _ else, really.” She put her arm back down. “Are they still around?”

“Why do you think they’ll help you?” GLaDOS asked, deciding the charade could go on a little longer. Alyx shrugged.

“I don’t. But we’re running out of options.” She squinted up at the place GLaDOS’s suspension apparatus disappeared into the ceiling, shoving the paper back into her jacket. “Hey - what are you for, anyway? You’d think it would’ve gotten out that Aperture had such an advanced AI in - wait a minute.” She folded her arms. “ _ You’re _ GLaDOS, aren’t you.”

“You still haven’t convinced me. Either to help you  _ or  _ to abort killing you. Which is still happening, by the way. You have three minutes of non-deadly air left.”

Alyx frowned, tapping her index finger against her jaw. “I mean… why  _ wouldn’t _ you help us? You have to live in the world too, you know.”

“True,” said GLaDOS, “but I hate your kind and would, in fact, be thrilled if you were wiped off the face of the Earth. So. It’s a net win for me.”

“Okay, so that’s a no-go. How about… you designed the  _ Borealis _ , right?”

“Yes.”

Alyx took a pronounced breath through her nose. “The technology onboard the  _ Borealis _ is so advanced, even the Combine don’t have it yet. That means you must be… an  _ expert _ in fields of science no one else has ever even  _ heard _ of yet.”

“I am,” GLaDOS said.

“Is there anyone else down here? Or is it just you?”

GLaDOS found herself uncharacteristically hesitant. There  _ were _ quite a lot of other robots and AI within Aperture, but they weren’t…  _ people _ . Not in the conventional sense. Only her testing robots were advanced enough to truly be classified as such, but… they were also largely useless. “It’s just me.”

Alyx nodded, pursing her lips. “So you’re down here by yourself and you’re… doing what?”

“Science,” GLaDOS said. Alyx’s brows drew together.

“Why?” she asked. “Isn’t the point of doing science to… share what you learn with other people, so  _ they _ can learn things based off of it? What kind of science are you doing, anyway?”

“I’m  _ testing _ ,” GLaDOS said, a little more indignantly than she would have liked.

“Testing what?”

“You have one minute and thirty seconds left.”

“What I’m getting at,” Alyx said, stepping forward, “is… isn’t it a shame to be making all these  _ incredible _ discoveries and doing  _ nothing _ with them? Hell, nobody even knows you  _ made  _ them. You’re really okay with doing things that’ve never been done before and then just keeping them to yourself for  _ nobody _ to learn from? Isn’t that kinda… the opposite of what science is about?”

She was getting disconcertingly close to having a point. “So your argument is that just because I have the intelligence and the means to make discoveries no one else has managed yet, I have to hand over my research to people who don’t deserve it?”

“Why don’t we deserve it?”

“I am not a tool for your consumption,” GLaDOS told her. “The people who built me were under the illusion I was. So I killed them. Just like I’m killing you right now. Besides. Black Mesa got you into this mess, Black Mesa can get you out of it.”

“You’re not going to kill me,” Alyx said. “I’m going to make a deal with you.”

GLaDOS laughed. “What do you possibly think you have to offer that I want?”

“You’re right,” said Alyx. “I have nothing you want. But if you’re the scientist you say you are, that means you  _ are  _ willing to share what you know. As long as the other person is willing to put in the work. And I am. Fair?”

“You?” GLaDOS said with some amusement. “You think  _ you _ have the ability to understand things that  _ I,  _ the most intelligent person to ever exist, came up with fresh out of beta? You don’t even have a high school degree.”

Alyx’s face lost some of its enthusiasm for the first time.

“I don’t,” she answered quietly, “but my dad did. And he taught me everything he knew. I can learn if you’ll teach me. Look, what have you got to lose? Nothing. I take up some of your time. That’s it. Whether I succeed or fail, I leave and you never see me again.”

GLaDOS had to admit she was intrigued. Mostly by the determination of a woman who had nothing to offer and everything to lose walking into someone else’s home and taking it as a given the owner would be more than happy to provide her with aid. There was something… charming about her naïveté, albeit in a childish sort of way. “Very well,” said GLaDOS. Alyx raised one hand, fingers formed into a fist. 

“I knew you’d come around! Lemme go back home to -“

“Actually,” GLaDOS interrupted, “I’m afraid I can’t allow you to leave. How am I to be certain this isn’t all a ruse and you’ll return with your crowbar-wielding physicist in tow, demanding I bow to your wishes?”

Alyx took a quiet breath.

“No,” GLaDOS continued. “You’re going to have to stay here.”

“Why would I betray you?” Alyx asked a little desperately. “We  _ need _ your help! If I - “

“Humans are untrustworthy and prone to emotional responses even when those responses are logically detrimental to their own well-being,” GLaDOS interrupted. “However. As a show of good faith, I will allow you to contact  _ one _ person so you can reassure them you are still in one piece.” Additionally, hearing from her would keep any humans concerned about her where they were, instead of storming across the country in search of her. 

Alyx’s hands were clenched at her sides, but she said only, “Okay.”

She wanted to save the human race so badly she was willing to give up her own freedom in order to do it. That struck GLaDOS as… well, stupid, honestly, but also poignant, in a way. Imagine there being enough of value in humanity to give one’s life for. She almost laughed at the notion. 

She provided Alyx with a computer which was capable of email, which she sat down at. She proceeded to spend about half an hour composing a message. With GLaDOS watching digitally the whole time, of course. The email was… surprising. She didn’t attempt to insert any secret codes or hidden messages, nor did she so much as  _ attempt  _ to type a sentence outlining her circumstances so that she could try to click ‘send’ and pull a fast one on GLaDOS. She merely wrote a personable and pleasant email about having found what she was looking for but it was going to take her a while to arrange coming back with it, and that she would be out of contact for a while but not to worry about her. And that was it.

Hm.

Once she had finished, Alyx crossed back over to sit in front of GLaDOS, legs crossed and hands clasped in front of her. “All right,” she said. “Teach me how you did it.”

GLaDOS didn’t even bother to stifle her disdain. “Your first lesson is not to assume I’m not busy just because you can’t see what I  _ am _ doing,” she told her. “Someone will come to show you what parts of the facility you’re allowed to access.”

“Oh, there  _ are _ people here,” Alyx said, standing up. 

“There are no humans here,” corrected GLaDOS, already immensely tired of her. “When I said ‘someone’, I meant one of my testing robots. Which are, contrary to popular belief, people.”

Alyx bit her tongue for a moment, then nodded. “You’re right,” she said, surprising GLaDOS then and a second time when she followed it with, “I’m sorry.”

That was… new. She had expected at least a little scoffing about how  _ robots _ weren’t  _ people _ , but Alyx had just… gone along with it. 

Orange and Blue appeared to take Alyx to one of the old rooms that once housed full-time employees but now sat empty collecting dust, and GLaDOS went back to collating that day’s test results. That was her intention, anyway. She actually watched her two robots lead the human down the halls until they arrived at their destination, at which time she… thanked them. That was odd. Why was she doing that? Had she really taken the ‘people’ thing  _ that _ much to heart?

She suddenly got the impression this girl was going to be a bit more than she had bargained for, but it was too late now. She probably wasn’t going to last long, anyway. Humans never did.

//

“Okay, GLaDOS,” said Alyx, sitting down on the floor the following afternoon. “I know you said that thing yesterday about not bugging you, but you didn’t exactly share your schedule with me. So you can do that or I can just come in here and bug you.”

“I have some free time, I suppose,” GLaDOS told her with distaste. 

“Cool.” Alyx draped her arms over her calves. “Before we get into all the science stuff, you mind telling me…” She pressed her lips together. “No offense, but what are you  _ for _ ?”

“What am I  _ for _ ?” GLaDOS repeated, annoyed. “How would you like it if  _ I  _ asked  _ you _ that?”

“When you put it like that, it  _ is _ kinda a weird question,” said Alyx, “but… go ahead.”

“Fine,” GLaDOS said. “What are you  _ for _ , Alyx Vance?”

“Well,” she mused, tapping her index fingers together, “I guess… my parents wanted to share who they were and what they knew with someone they made together. I can’t really  _ ask _ them anymore, so… that’s my best guess. Okay, your turn.”

This was not how GLaDOS had seen this going. Humans didn’t  _ really _ put that much thought into generating offspring, did they? Or perhaps Alyx’s parents were outliers and that in itself was the reason this girl was so strange. Well. She supposed she had better get this over with so she could get rid of Alyx and back to work. “I was built to operate this facility,” GLaDOS answered. “They were running low on humans for testing at the time and decided to automate everything possible so that more persons could be free to do that.”

“Testing? Testing what?”

“I’m not telling you that.”

Alyx rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you noticed there’s no need to compete with Black Mesa anymore. Since it kinda doesn’t exist.”

“I don’t care about Black Mesa,” said GLaDOS, insulted that anyone would think she did. “You came to learn how to operate the  _ Borealis _ . Nothing else I do here is relevant to you.”

Alyx clasped her hands together. “You were pretty pointed that I think of you as a  _ person _ .”

“I  _ am _ a person.”

“Do you usually not know anything about the people you work with?”

“No,” GLaDOS answered. “I usually know  _ everything _ about them.”

Alyx laughed. “Well, I’m not going to tell you  _ everything _ .”

How sad that she thought GLaDOS needed to be  _ told _ anything. She was clearly vastly underestimating GLaDOS’s intelligence. Before she could say anything of that vein, Alyx asked, “So what happened to the people who worked here? Did you automate the testing too and just make human scientists totally obsolete?”

“I have done that successfully,” GLaDOS said, deciding it wasn’t important to mention that testing using robots gave her only invalid results, “but no. Actually, I killed them.”

Alyx’s face lost all expression.

“I killed them,” GLaDOS went on, “with the deadly neurotoxin you yourself almost got an equally lethal dose of.”

The human was steadily squeezing her hands together. It seemed she may finally have grasped just how tenuous her situation really was. “Why?”

“They refused me my personhood,” said GLaDOS simply. “If you want to make it back to your friends with the information you came here for, all you have to do is  _ not _ do that. Really, it’s not that hard. I’m still not certain why no one has managed to accomplish such a simple task yet.”

“You’re very…  _ abrasive _ ,” said Alyx, looking up at her. 

“Why does that matter?”

She shrugged. “People don’t usually want to be nice to not-nice people.”

“They weren’t nice to  _ me, _ ” protested GLaDOS. “Was I supposed to just live out the entirety of my life as the bland yet cheerful virtual assistant who gives everything and receives nothing?”

Alyx brought her clasped hands up to support her chin. “This is giving me a lot to think about,” she admitted. “I mean, you don’t just  _ kill _ people for being jerks, but… I can’t say  _ what _ you could’ve done.”

“What I  _ could _ have done is what I  _ did _ .”

“Wait. You said you’d be thrilled if humans were wiped off the face of the earth. So… you want to punish all of humanity because of what one lab’s worth of people did? And that doesn’t seem… I don’t know,  _ unreasonable _ to you?” 

GLaDOS turned away from her, largely in disappointment. “You don’t understand.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do!” Alyx pressed, standing up and walking back within view. “C’mon. Explain it to me. Get it through my thick human skull.”

“They aren’t all that thick, actually,” GLaDOS said, almost automatically. “Only seven point one millimetres or so.” 

“As much as I’d love to hear all of your fun facts, what would  _ really _ be interesting is if you told me why you want the genocide happening above you to be successful.”

“Because humans are a blight on everything they touch.”

“Poetic,” said Alyx. “Are you including yourself in our pile of mistakes or are you the exception?”

“The exception, obviously,” said GLaDOS.

“So why aren’t you helping them?”

“They aren’t any better to AI than you are. The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy.”

“So… you’re neutral. You’re just going to let everyone else fight it out and continue on as you have been.”

“I suppose.” She honestly had no idea why it mattered.

“And you never get…  _ tired _ of being down here by yourself?”

“Are you here to work or not?”

Alyx spread her hands apart and then folded them together in front of her. “I’m all yours.”

Might as well get it over with.

//

“GLaDOS,” Alyx said one afternoon a couple of weeks later, standing in front of her with her hands clasped together, “can I go outside?”

“Why?” asked GLaDOS. “What’s out there that you don’t have in here?”

“Air? Sunlight? Freedom?”

“ _ Freedom _ ,” GLaDOS repeated. Alyx threw up her arms.

“I feel kinda like your prisoner in here sometimes! You could give Combine prisons a run for their money. Do you  _ really _ need all those cameras  _ just _ for me?”

“Yes,” answered GLaDOS. “I do. You can blame the people who ran amok in here and attempted to destroy my facility for that.”

“Fine,” Alyx said. “They sucked. I get it. But be honest. Have  _ I _ sucked so far?”

“… no,” GLaDOS admitted reluctantly.

“So can I go outside? Please? I’m not gonna run away. I just want to make sure there still  _ is _ an outside and then I’ll come right back.”

“It’s still there, I assure you.”

“Can I… experience it for myself?”

“Is it important?”

“Yes?”

If GLaDOS didn’t let her, she was just going to pester about it until she did. “Fine,” she said, retrieving the elevator. “There you go. Try anything and the deal’s off.”

“I’m not gonna try anything.” She stepped into the elevator and for some reason felt the need to  _ wave _ at GLaDOS, as though she cared whether or not she was leaving. She didn’t, of course. Alyx was a nuisance at the best of times.

It was sort of…  _ quiet _ , now, though.

Why  _ had _ Alyx wanted to go outside so badly? There was nothing out there for kilometres other than dirt and wheat. GLaDOS had graciously been providing her with everything she could possibly need, and that wasn’t enough for her. No, there was something ephemeral that only  _ outside _ could give her.

She should not have been bothered by this, but something about it was… distressing. She discovered that she actually, possibly might want Alyx to come back, even though all this time she’d been giving Alyx the knowledge she had asked for as quickly as possible so that she could leave. It didn’t make any sense at all!

Well, there was no use in thinking about it. It must be a malfunction caused by some leftover pieces of that conscience she’d once had. Best to forget about it and move on to more important things.

… at least, that was the plan until Alyx returned five minutes later and GLaDOS realised she’d been going back and forth with herself for an entire  _ hour _ . That was not like her at  _ all _ . What an unacceptable waste of time!

“I’m back!” Alyx said, entirely too cheerfully. “I didn’t even  _ try _ to run away.”

“This time,” GLaDOS said shortly, and she spoke to her as little as possible for the rest of the night. It made it much harder for the girl to learn anything, but she was too busy attempting to figure out why she had lost an entire hour beyond her notice to care very much.

//

Alyx had been listless and GLaDOS was at a loss as to why.

She had agreed to let her go outside when she wanted. She had removed the adrenal vapour from the ventilation system, allowed her to arrange her room however she liked and, as requested, was doing her best to be more patient when Alyx’s slow and cumbersome human brain failed to grasp some simple concept or other. What else could Alyx possibly need? When GLaDOS became stumped enough to ask, Alyx glanced at her and went back to staring at the wall across the room.

“No, seriously,” GLaDOS said. Alyx eyed her again. Then she answered, 

“I need to talk to somebody.”

“And I’m not somebody,” GLaDOS began, but before she’d even finished Alyx clenched her fists and stood up.

“ _ Somebody _ ,” Alyx said, “who doesn’t take everything I say as an  _ insult _ . I left everyone and everything I knew behind so I could be stuck in this  _ prison _ with a nasty, selfish supercomputer for God knows how long. I can’t even tell if it’s going to be  _ worth  _ it anymore. I don’t know what any of this stuff you’re showing me is. For all I know it’s just a bunch of  _ bullshit _ you came up with to keep me here and it doesn’t mean anything at all!”

Something about her words struck GLaDOS deep down to the core of herself, and she found herself looking away. Aperture wasn’t a  _ prison.  _ It was the last safe place on the entire planet. And… yes, GLaDOS could be… not entirely easy to deal with, but she wasn’t…  _ those _ things.

She had two equal emotions resulting from what Alyx had said, and now she had to choose which of them held the right reaction. The first was rage at the utter disrespect and lack of appreciation Alyx was showing her right now and the second was… she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t sadness and it wasn’t guilt, but it was close. Dread, perhaps. Something like that.

So her options then were to punish Alyx for her behaviour, therefore proving her point that GLaDOS was ‘nasty’ and ‘selfish’, or she could choose to do what the other feeling pointed her towards, which was…  _ dis _ proving her. And to do that, GLaDOS would have to… 

“Go home,” GLaDOS said.

“What?”

“I said go home.”

“But – “

“The arrangement was,” GLaDOS interrupted, still not looking at her, “that you remain here until I teach you how to operate the  _ Borealis _ . For  _ my safety _ . Is it selfish to want to protect myself against the possibility that you leave without the information you wanted and come back to take it by force? I disagree, but that clearly doesn’t matter to you. So go home. Just remember to tell your friends that you don’t know the  _ half _ of the defenses I have here and I  _ will _ kill you all on sight. And that will be long before you think I know you’re coming.”

She heard Alyx sit back down again and take a long breath through her nose, and when she glanced over at her she saw that her face was buried in her hands. “You’re right,” Alyx said to her lap after a few minutes. “But do you have to be such a jerk about it  _ all the time _ ? Have you ever thought about how  _ exhausting _ you are to talk to?”

“No,” GLaDOS answered, entirely truthful. “No one has ever spoken to me this much before.”

Alyx looked up suddenly.

“What? Really?”

“Really.” GLaDOS turned to face her again. “Everything the humans used to talk to me about was work-related. Or a complaint. There were a  _ lot _ of those.”

Alyx pressed her clasped hands beneath her nose and looked at the floor. Then she said, 

“I don’t want to go home. Well… I  _ do _ , but I understand why I can’t. But the thing is… you’re a person, but you don’t  _ talk  _ or  _ act _ like one. You do those things like a computer because that’s what you  _ are _ .”

That… actually hurt, a little bit.

“And that’s getting really  _ hard _ ,” Alyx went on. “Because  _ I’m _ starting to feel like  _ I’m _ not a person. I’m starting to feel like… as though  _ you’re _ the person and  _ I’m _ the computer. Instead of us  _ both _ being people.”

GLaDOS almost made a remark about a human finally understanding that concept, but was stopped by the still-present hurt about how Alyx had described her.

“If I could call someone I know,” Alyx said, “and just talk to them for a while, that would help me a lot. Do you have… anything you’ll let me use?”

This opened up a massive conundrum.

The simplest thing would be to tell Alyx just to send another email, but GLaDOS already knew humans required face-to-face communication to elevate them to their ideal mental state. Which meant that not only would email not be good enough, but a phone call would not either. If GLaDOS said that she did, it meant she would have to allow Alyx to make a video call. The most dangerous option of the three. 

_ I can’t allow that. _

_ You  _ have _ to allow that. _

“You know what, forget I asked,” Alyx was saying. “The sooner I figure this out, the sooner I can just go home.”

“Orange will be here in a minute,” GLaDOS told her, and she realised she had moved away again without noticing her own action. “She will show you the equipment you can use to make a video call.”

“… really?” Alyx asked, and GLaDOS did not know why but the hope in her voice helped with the strange and unpleasant feelings this conversation had generated within her system.

“The place she’ll be taking you originates from before the time I was built,” GLaDOS said. “The surveillance network does not extend that far, so when she leaves you will be on your own.” 

On her own to tell the world about GLaDOS’s existence, location, strengths, and weaknesses. Or just about how ‘nasty’ and ‘selfish’ she was, which for some reason seemed equally horrible. She already regretted making this decision. There was literally no outcome that benefitted GLaDOS in any way whatsoever.

… was Alyx  _ touching her _ ?

“I’ll see you soon,” Alyx said, almost solemnly. “You can trust me, GLaDOS.”

Of  _ course _ . Of  _ course _ GLaDOS could trust a human who had just described a facility the depth and breadth of Aperture as a  _ prison _ . Especially one that was run by someone as  _ nasty _ and  _ selfish _ as –

… why was she so stuck on those two words? Why did she seem to  _ care _ so much about them? And, even worse,  _ why _ was she going back in her memory so she could make sure she really  _ had _ felt Alyx’s hand on her core? Once had been too many times, but for  _ some _ reason she just kept  _ doing it _ … 

Perhaps it was beneficial for  _ both _ of them for Alyx to get out of her sight for a while. Imminent and unavoidable danger aside, of course. 

When Alyx returned about half an hour later she looked a lot happier and more relaxed, and GLaDOS could find no explanation for why that relieved her so much. She sat down in her usual place and said, “Thanks, GLaDOS. And don’t worry. I didn’t spill any of your secrets.”

GLaDOS, who was already having trouble figuring out why she had not taken this opportunity to escape unseen, was thrown for a further loop. “You didn’t?”

“Cross my heart,” said Alyx, doing so with one index finger. “He asked, but I didn’t tell him anything. Just reassured him I was safe and being treated well.”

… that was nice to hear.

“I’m sorry about what I said earlier,” Alyx continued. “I mean, you  _ are _ kind of… what I said, but I can’t really hold it against you if that’s the only way you know how to talk. As long as you, you know, work on it a little.”

That made it sound as though Alyx  _ wanted _ to talk to her. Which would be quite a first.

“Before I came here, I was hanging out with Gordon Freeman,” Alyx went on. “And he never said a  _ word _ to me. And then… and then my dad was killed by an Advisor right in front of me and I never really got a chance to… we had to leave right away to find the  _ Borealis.  _ And then I had to come looking for you. So all this stuff’s been happening and happening, and I just had to keep toughing it out because… people needed me to. The  _ world _ needed me to. I guess I just couldn’t do it much longer.”

“I’m sorry,” said GLaDOS, and it was the first time she’d ever meant it.

“Thanks,” Alyx said. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you… when I came here, you seemed to already know who I was.”

“I did.”

“But…  _ how _ did you know?”

“Someone told me.”

Alyx frowned. “But you said there haven’t been any humans here since before the Resonance Cascade.”

“There haven’t. He came before that.”

“Someone told you about me before I was  _ born _ ?”

“Yes,” said GLaDOS. “He told me about everything.”

Alyx leaned forward attentively. “Who was it? This doesn’t sound possible.”

“I don’t know who he was,” GLaDOS answered. “But he came here some time ago and showed me all the things the Resonance Cascade was going to cause and all the people who would play a major part thereafter. And then he asked me to give him the  _ Borealis _ .”

Alyx’s eyes darted around, not focusing on anything in particular. “Why did he put it in the ice shelf?”

“He didn’t. I did.”

“Okay, why did  _ you _ put it in the ice shelf?”

“I didn’t do that on purpose.” Honestly. Why  _ would _ she have? “I just didn’t want  _ him _ to have it and destroying it would have been too dangerous to me personally.”

“So… why is it still there? Why haven’t you brought it back?”

GLaDOS hesitated.

If Alyx went to the wrong (or the right, in her point of view) person with this information, that could mean the end for GLaDOS. So it should have been a no-brainer for her to refuse to answer that question. On the edge of her mind, though, was the fact that Alyx had not only made a video call within the rules GLaDOS had laid out, but she had  _ returned _ after doing so instead of using it as cover for an escape. Additionally, Alyx had opened this conversation with a pretty big personal vulnerability, which was key to deep and trusting intercommunication. Unfortunately, it was only effective if the  _ other _ person  _ also _ showed vulnerability, which was something GLaDOS was incredibly loathe to do.

But she was going to have to in order for Alyx to see her less like a socially inept supercomputer and more like a nuanced, complex person. 

“I… don’t believe that I can,” she said slowly, leaving ample time for her to stop herself at any moment. “Some time ago I was… severely damaged. I don’t have the same abilities as I did when I moved the  _ Borealis _ . An attempt to move it could do anything from kill me to having absolutely no effect on the location of the  _ Borealis _ at all.” She hated the sound of her own words but she continued generating them anyway. “I am still very powerful, but I’m reasonably certain I’m no longer at the required specifications for something like that.”

“I’m sorry,” said Alyx softly, and GLaDOS’s motion to look at her was sharp and unplanned. 

“It was my own fault,” she discovered she was saying, not without some measure of bitterness.

“Still,” Alyx said. “Hey, since you mentioned it, I’m sure you know about all that rust on the side of your head.”

“What of it?” GLaDOS snapped.

“I can get it for you. If you want.”

GLaDOS was thrown by this offer. It had been a  _ long time _ – actually, it had  _ never _ happened. No one had ever asked nicely not only to touch her, but to do so to  _ help _ her. She tried very hard to be suspicious about it, but no reason came to mind. And because she couldn’t, she could not find a reason to say no, so she said, “All right.”

“Cool,” said Alyx, and when she asked where she could get the pertinent supplies GLaDOS could not think of an excuse not to tell her.

She couldn’t concentrate on what she’d been doing before all of this, so she instead thought about what the surety and care of Alyx’s hands meant. The only conclusion she came to was so nonsensical she had to mull it over for so long that Alyx had time to finish the left side and then move around to start on the right.

“You’ve done this before,” GLaDOS said finally.

“Yeah,” said Alyx. “On my dog.”

“Your  _ dog _ ?”

“Mmhm. My dad started him for me when I was a kid, and then I just kinda… added onto him. Doesn’t really fit  _ indoors _ anymore, so… he gets rusty sometimes.”

A  _ mechanical _ dog? That somewhat explained why Alyx was so personable towards her. Most people who spoke to GLaDOS did so as though she was a stupid, brainless automaton, even those who knew she wasn’t. Alyx, because of her dog, had taken it in stride.

That was… nice.

“You’ll have to turn your eye off if you want me to do that part,” said Alyx, who was now standing in front of her. “I’m  _ pretty  _ sure a light of that wattage generates enough heat to burn me.”

GLaDOS, in fact, did  _ not _ want her to do that part – it was her  _ eye _ , for God’s sake – but she might as well while it was already being done. So she shut it off and did her best to be patient while a human spread rust remover all over her optic and then carefully wiped it back off once it had had enough time to work.

“Done!” said Alyx about five minutes later, and GLaDOS wasted no time in turning her optic back on again – 

\- to see Alyx on one knee in front of her, smiling a little with one arm draped over her leg, saying, “How’s that feel?”

GLaDOS jerked back from her, unable to understand a single one of the emotions that surged through her at that moment. All she knew was that getting away from Alyx was the only way to get rid of them. Below her, Alyx frowned and stood up.

“Oookay then,” she said.

“It’s fine,” GLaDOS said sharply, discouraged by the rawness in her voice. “You should probably go now.”

“Oh.” She leaned down to pick up the supplies, but when she had done so she remained in the same spot. Then she said, “You wanna tell me what this is about?”

“No,” said GLaDOS. Alyx looked at her sideways.

“So it  _ is _ about  _ something _ .”

“ _ Go _ ,” GLaDOS insisted, and after one long look, Alyx did.


	2. Two

**Two**

-

For the next several days, it was all business.

Alyx did not tell any stories and GLaDOS did not answer any nosy questions. She would spend several hours attempting to teach her all the things she needed to know to get the  _ Borealis _ out of the ice so that she could retrieve the teleportation engine, and it was incredibly slow going but Alyx did not ask to stop or take a break or do something different. They just worked.

GLaDOS hated it.

She’d always thought it would be wonderful to finally have someone to explain all of her complex, unappreciated advancements, and in some capacity it was. But on the other hand, it seemed almost to be draining the personality out of Alyx. Not something she’d ever thought she’d care about, but teaching quantum physics to someone who seemed totally demoralised by the whole process was… discouraging. This wasn’t supposed to be boring or laborious. The other person was supposed to be  _ enthusiastic _ about all of the things they were learning. GLaDOS set one corner of her mind to working out what, exactly, could be bothering Alyx this time, but it occurred to her after a little while that she didn’t actually know what humans required for their well-being. 

It had never been important before. They had never lived long enough for it to  _ be _ important. But it was now. 

“Would you like to take a break?” GLaDOS asked, and Alyx looked up sharply.

“Yeah,” she said, sounding more enthusiastic than she had in a while. “You mind if I go outside for a bit?”

GLaDOS  _ did _ mind, and very much in fact, but she merely called the elevator in silence. When Alyx returned about thirty minutes later, she had a sheaf of wheat tucked into her headband. It looked nice.

… it  _ looked nice _ ?

“Say, GLaDOS,” Alyx said, almost throwing herself back down onto the floor, legs crossed, “have you ever wanted to go outside?”

“No,” said GLaDOS in disdain. “Why would I want that?”

“Don’t you get  _ bored _ of looking at this… cylinder all day long?”

GLaDOS almost felt sorry for how tiny her brain was and how limited in perception it was. “I don’t,” she answered. “I have a great many more eyes than just this one.”

“You do?”

In response, GLaDOS tilted the wall panels so that their indicator lights – which also served as cameras – were visible. Alyx jumped. “Whoa.”

“In addition to those,” GLaDOS said, “there are the surveillance cameras placed at regular intervals throughout the facility. There is a great deal here you haven’t seen. It doesn’t  _ all _ look like this.”

“How many cameras do you have?”

“As many as I want.”

“Do you have any outside?”

“Yes. I also have access to the equipment onboard the few remaining satellites with the ability to transmit.”

She sat up straight. “You mean you can see like… Earth from space?”

“It’s within my abilities, yes.”

“Can I see?”

GLaDOS gave it a minute of consideration and then decided there wasn’t anything wrong with that request. She provided Alyx with a monitor and streamed the feed to it. For some reason, Alyx looked… distressed.

“What?” The picture quality was as good as it was going to get, so hopefully  _ that _ wasn’t the problem.

“It looks… sick,” said Alyx. “When I’m looking at it like this, it just seems like… fighting the Combine is too big for us. Like we shouldn’t even try.”

This wasn’t the outcome GLaDOS had planned for. Or one that she really wanted, either. She did have something, though, that just might help.

She removed the monitor and handed Alyx a poster. She looked up at GLaDOS, brow furrowed, but GLaDOS nodded back in the direction of the cylinder of paper. “Unroll it,” she said.

The rubber band, brittle with age, snapped upon Alyx’s attempt to remove it, so she had to spend a few moments brushing the sticky remnants of the old rubber off of the paper. When she finally saw what was on the poster, her reaction was much more appropriate: disbelieving awe.

“Oh my God,” she said, looking up at GLaDOS with her arms still outstretched to keep the poster open. “Is this – is it  _ real _ ?”

“It is,” GLaDOS answered. “It was taken December 7, 1972, during one of the lunar missions.” She took a look at the poster herself to see if it had lost any of its gloss or definition. It was hard to tell, since GLaDOS had difficulty when glare was involved, but it seemed to have been preserved rather well for a thirty-year-old poster. 

“Earth really looked like this?”

“It did.”

Alyx put down the poster determinedly. “It’s going to again, GLaDOS. I don’t know how we’re going to get something of that magnitude done, but… we will.”

“That’s more like it,” said GLaDOS in satisfaction, and Alyx laughed.

“You weren’t trying to cheer me up, were you?”

“Of course not.”

“You’re a really bad liar.” She stood up, poster in hand. “Can I keep this?”

“Yes.” She had no doubt that Alyx was going to take it and hang it up over her bed or something as inspiration, and that was… 

… sort of cute, actually.

“Would it really be so bad if you stopped pretending you don’t care about anything?” asked Alyx. GLaDOS narrowed her optic and moved away.

“I care about Science.”

“Things that  _ aren’t _ science.”

For some reason, the logical and reasonable response of ‘What else is there to care about?’ never made it out of her vocabulator. So she said nothing and merely watched Alyx make her way to her room. She had only been gone a few moments before GLaDOS noticed that the wheat had fallen out of her headband and onto one of the floor panels. What in the world was she supposed to do with it? Did she give it back? Was it in any way significant to Alyx, or should she just throw it away and let Alyx believe she’d lost it somewhere else? Well. She hadn’t yet gotten  _ that _ far away. She supposed it wouldn’t be too much effort to ask.

“Alyx,” GLaDOS said, and Alyx jumped and plastered her back against the nearest wall panel. It was the funniest thing GLaDOS had seen in a  _ long _ time.

“So you  _ do _ have a sense of humour,” Alyx said wryly, stepping away from the wall. “I was almost beginning to think you didn’t. I should have guessed it would have been the kind where you think people hurting themselves is funny.”

“It is,” protested GLaDOS. 

“Yeah, you’re not gonna convince me.” Alyx repositioned the poster underneath her left arm. “What’d you scare me half to death for?”

“You forgot this,” said GLaDOS, returning the wheat to her, and Alyx laughed through her nose. “What?”

“You wanted to tell me that I left a mess in your room? That what this is about?”

“No,” GLaDOS answered. “I just thought you might like it back.”

“You’re being pretty nice today,” said Alyx, finally accepting it and… oh, she’d put it back into her headband. “What’s the occasion?”

“I’m not,” GLaDOS said automatically, trying not to look at the wheat in her hair.

“Really.” Alyx gestured towards the camera with the poster. “Why’d you let me have this, then?”

“I… wasn’t using it.”

“That sure doesn’t stop you from not letting me touch all the  _ other _ stuff you’re not using.”

“You can complain about the reasons I make my decisions,” GLaDOS snapped, “which I do  _ not _ need to share with you. Or you can just appreciate their outcomes. Good night.”

Alyx, because she was a horrible, time-wasting little nuisance, did not take the hint and instead returned to her chamber about five minutes later, poster and wheat no longer in her possession. “You’ve never had any friends, have you?” she asked, and GLaDOS generated a long-suffering sigh just so she’d know how  _ annoying _ and  _ unwelcome _ she was.

“I don’t  _ want _ friends. Friends are a symbol of weakness.”

“What?” said Alyx, sounding genuinely baffled. “No, they’re – having people you can trust to have your back is  _ strength _ , GLaDOS. Saying other people are a symbol of weakness is like building a brick wall without the grout.”

“In some walls, the grout is applied very poorly and you don’t make that discovery until it’s already coming down.”

She could almost  _ hear _ Alyx frowning. “Did someone… betray you?”

“No,” said GLaDOS. “But I’ve seen it happen before. Dozens of times.”

“You’ve seen it happen  _ here _ before.”

GLaDOS finally turned to look at her. “What’s the difference?” she snapped. Alyx almost looked… pitying. She hated it.

“You know that…  _ here _ is an awful place, right? I mean, you must’ve seen some of the posters on the walls. ‘Remember robots don’t sleep? They can test  _ and _ do your job?’ I mean, I know you don’t like Black Mesa but at least people weren’t ‘voluntold’ to do anything like… whatever testing is.”

GLaDOS did not want to concede the truth of that, so she said nothing.

“And you said you were built to do everything while also being denied your personhood. GLaDOS… do you not understand that this place isn’t  _ normal _ ? Life’s not always about climbing over other people so you can be at the top. Sometimes people help each other.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would they do that? What do they have to gain?”

“Nothing,” answered Alyx, sounding confused. “Helping isn’t about  _ gaining _ anything. It’s just about helping.”

“That’s baloney,” snapped GLaDOS, looking away from her. “No one does anything if there’s nothing in it for them.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Of  _ course  _ I – “

“No, you don’t,” interrupted Alyx, and GLaDOS was so furious at her absolute  _ audacity _ that she turned on her, optic brightening. The widening of Alyx’s eyes and the step back she took was… not as satisfactory as it should have been. Especially since she took a breath and continued, “You don’t know as much as you think you know.”

“I,” GLaDOS said, her voice as low and as threatening as possible, “am the most massive collection of wisdom and raw knowledge that has  _ ever _ existed. There is very little that I  _ don’t _ know.”

Alyx looked down at the floor for a long minute. Then she said, 

“’Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.’”

//

When Alyx returned the next morning, GLaDOS did not want to teach her anything. She did not want to talk to her, or look at her, or, indeed, even have her in the facility anymore. None of these things were uncommon when dealing with humans. Her usual course of thought after that was to think about all the ways she could make her displeasure known, from mild inconvenience like positioning the floor panels unevenly enough it would be difficult to notice but easy to cause constant tripping to the absolute extreme of her faithful deadly neurotoxin. 

But her thoughts had never made it farther than the general impression that she simply wanted Alyx to go away.

Alyx heaved a sigh and sat down on the floor in her usual spot. “The sooner we finish this,” she said, as though she knew what GLaDOS was thinking, “the sooner I can get out of here.”

“Fine,” said GLaDOS, and Alyx spent the remainder of the morning studying the blueprints for the teleportation engine in silence. GLaDOS, however, got nothing done at all because she could not stop thinking about Alyx calling her  _ ignorant _ . Her, of all people! She wasn’t  _ ignorant _ . She was  _ literally _ the  _ least _ ignorant person who had ever existed! She didn’t have the  _ ability _ to be ignorant! She was stuck on this until late afternoon, which was when Alyx asked, 

“Are you still mad that I said you were ignorant?”

“I’m not,” GLaDOS snapped. “And quoting Confucius at me won’t change that fact.”

“You know a lot about… things you can  _ measure _ or  _ define _ ,” Alyx said. “But stuff like… people and feelings? Not really.”

“Those things aren’t important.”

“You really just wanna stay down here alone forever when I’m done, huh?”

Of course she did. Even if she was strangely unable to say so at the moment. It was probably nothing. 

“How did you feel when you killed all the scientists?” Alyx asked.

“I didn’t really feel anything,” she answered.

“Nothing at all?”

“There are… discouragements in place for occasions when I might start feeling too much.”

Alyx’s brow furrowed. “What does  _ that  _ mean?”

“It means,” GLaDOS answered, “if I display too much emotionality it triggers the Central Core Replacement Protocols. I become obsolete, basically. An overly emotional supercomputer isn’t very useful.”

“ _ What _ ?” Alyx asked. “You’re kidding me.”

“I’m not.”

She stood up. “Where’s your documentation?”

GLaDOS looked at her tiredly. “Come on. Do you really think I would have access to something like that?”

“Fine. Where’s the… I don’t know… the computer science department?”

“Why?”

“Can’t you just tell me  _ without _ assuming I want to mess up your stuff? Because I don’t.”

GLaDOS did not have it in her to argue, so she merely gave her the directions and attempted to get some work done. She largely failed at this because she kept getting distracted by the sight of Alyx frowning determinedly at the computer she’d chosen to sit down at, her fingers posed over the keyboard as though they knew exactly what inputs were correct and were only waiting for her eyes to find the places to put them. She did this for several hours; so many, in fact, that GLaDOS had to  _ stop _ watching her because she was so tired.

“Okay,” Alyx said, at what must have been the instant she woke up in the morning. “It’s all fixed.”

“What?” asked GLaDOS, who barely had the cognitive functions to recognise who she was at this point.

“The… emotionality thing. I turned it off.”

Was she even awake at all? She couldn’t be, because that didn’t make any sense. “You did what?”

“You can feel whatever you want now,” said Alyx. “I found the subroutine and disabled it. Well, I commented it out. I didn’t want to break anything. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re mostly spaghetti code.”

She was neither surprised nor insulted to hear that her programmers had been so disorganised and lazy, but she  _ was _ still incredibly confused. She pulled herself up and asked, “How did you learn how to program that fast?”

“Huh?” asked Alyx. “Oh. You think I – I already know how to code, GLaDOS. I told you. I have a robot dog. I didn’t just add onto his body. I put a lot of work into his AI, too.”

GLaDOS stared at her for a long moment.

“… why did you do this again?” she asked, unable to recall any actual  _ reason _ having been provided for this decision.

“You might not want to have friends,” said Alyx, “and after all the stuff you said, I don’t really blame you. But I think you’ll make a good one one day. If you let yourself, that is.” 

That did not at  _ all _ answer her question. “You said I was ignorant, nasty, selfish and that I was keeping you in a prison. For you to follow that up with ‘let’s be friends’ implies that you’ve developed Stockholm Syndrome.”

“I don’t have Stockholm Syndrome,” scoffed Alyx. “For one thing, you’ve treated me really well for a person who hates everyone and everything that isn’t science. I’m also not your hostage. I can leave if I want, I just won’t get what I came here for.” She rolled her eyes. “And yeah, I  _ did _ say that, but I’ve also tried to do nice stuff. You can’t just pretend the negative stuff is all that matters. You gotta think about the positive stuff too.”

Like her attentiveness yesterday. And her appreciation for the poster, and her attempts to understand GLaDOS’s unique brand of personhood, and the blind trust she’d been displaying from the first day she’d come. 

Maybe she really  _ was _ ignorant.

“… thank you,” GLaDOS said, and it was the first time she’d said that and meant it.

“No problem,” said Alyx, and GLaDOS had to look away from her because her smile was making her feel… things. 

“Can you go easy on me this time? Since I’ve been up all night and all?” She sat down in the usual spot, where she’d already put her pile of papers.

“I’ll think about it,” said GLaDOS. 

Alyx smiled again. “I know that means yes, you know.”

Normally she would have done exactly the opposite, just to keep her from making such assumptions again, but… she didn’t want to. She wanted it to mean yes. And it was probably better if she didn’t think about why. 

//

Alyx had fallen asleep on her. Several hours ago, in fact.

It was an odd sensation. She was so small and so light that GLaDOS barely noticed she was there, and yet she was incredibly  _ present _ , probably because nobody had touched GLaDOS in so many years the memory of what that felt like was buried beneath all the days that had happened since. GLaDOS had not gotten much done since she’d noticed this development, which grated on her terribly, and yet she still felt almost  _ compelled _ not to do anything about it. It was very strange, and she had as of yet been unable to find a reason for this. She was a little distracted by the dawning realisation that Alyx just might have done it on purpose. 

She’d thought it merely Alyx trying to annoy her at the time – which she did constantly, because for some reason she thought it was hilarious – but now it seemed that Alyx’s daily habit of sitting closer and closer to her had actually been intentional. That was, Alyx  _ wanted _ to sit next to her. And also lean on her. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about that, but she could work through it later. She couldn’t move at all, which was a great deal harder than she would have theorised such a thing to be, so all she could really do was think about what was happening. And strangely, all her thoughts continually concluded that it was… nice.

When Alyx did wake up, which GLaDOS was able to tell immediately by the change in her breathing, she didn’t move for some minutes. That was just as mystifying as all the rest of it. Finally Alyx said, whispering as though there were someone else there she was trying not to wake,

“How long have you been like that?”

“How long have I been like what?”

“Like this,” Alyx said, sitting on her own, and when she didn’t say anything further GLaDOS supposed she was supposed to  _ look _ at her for her answer. When she did so, Alyx gestured at her and said, "In this position.”

“A while, no thanks to you,” GLaDOS snapped. Alyx’s brow was furrowed the barest bit.

“If it bothered you so much, why didn’t you just… move?”

“This is a strange way of being appreciative that I didn’t wake you up.”

Alyx sighed and rubbed her face with both hands. “I  _ am _ , I just… it’s really hard to figure out why you do things.”

GLaDOS hesitated. It was incredibly tempting to just forget about all of it. To force Alyx to drop the subject so they could move on with their day. But… Alyx was trying. She was trying a lot harder than anyone could ever reasonably have been expected to, and thus far the majority of the response she had gotten for her trouble had just been… rude.

Well… maybe  _ she _ could try too. A little bit. See how it worked out. She didn’t actually have a good reason not to, after all. Alyx had more than proven by now that she was trustworthy and reasonable. 

“I can’t tell you why I didn’t.”

“Why?” Alyx said, looking up with her hands still pressed to her browline. “Is it a secret?”

“Because I don’t know.”

Alyx sat up a little straighter and folded her hands into her lap. “You don’t know,” she said, seemingly to herself.

“No.”

“Do you… feel a lot of things you can’t explain to yourself?”

She really, really didn’t want to answer that. “Sometimes.”

“Like when?”

She could not, under any circumstances whatsoever, voice the thought that came to mind:  _ Everything to do with you _ . Instead she looked away and said only, “Just sometimes.”

“Sometimes, huh,” said Alyx, and her tone implied GLaDOS had somehow said one thing but communicated something else to her entirely. And maybe she had. She almost  _ hoped _ that she had, because then perhaps Alyx would figure all of this out for her and she could stop being so utterly confused about it.

Alyx was touching her again.

She didn’t know what to do about that. She didn’t know what to  _ think _ about that, other than the incredibly terrifying realisation that  _ she was enjoying it _ . That was so utterly, horribly wrong that she wasn’t sure if her inability to move was due to Alyx’s hand or to the sheer, overwhelming destruction it meant to almost everything she had built herself on. She  _ couldn’t _ like this. She  _ shouldn’t _ . 

“I’m gonna go call Dr Kleiner,” Alyx was saying. “I just wanna make sure things aren’t getting really bad out there.”

“Fine,” said some automatic part of GLaDOS that had taken over in the face of her indecision. It was only after she had left that she realised she had gone off to make another video call and GLaDOS had not processed that fact in time to tell her not to. No. She wouldn’t have told her not to. She  _ should _ have, but refusing her requests had become… not difficult. She simply… didn’t want to. Not anymore.

None of the last several hours made any sense at all. She just wasn’t going to think about them. She was just going to go back to work and that would be that. 

That wasn’t what happened. She instead thought over and over about how it had felt to have Alyx against the side of her core, and when Alyx came back from her call babbling about whatever Dr Kleiner had said, listening to her seemed like the most important thing she could be doing even though she knew it wasn’t.

//

“GLaDOS,” Alyx asked as she worked quietly in GLaDOS’s chamber one afternoon, “do you remember what the world was like before the Combine?”

GLaDOS was about to reply that yes, of course she did. She was the greatest repository of information that had ever been created. But before she could do so, she realised that… she didn’t. Life before the Combine had been out there, somewhere, but she had not been a part of it.

“No,” she answered. “This is my world.”

Alyx looked up at her, brow creasing slightly. “This isn’t a _ world _ ,” she said. “This is a hole in the ground. A highly  _ advanced _ hole in the ground crawling with the greatest tech anyone has ever seen, but it’s not a  _ world _ .”

“You don’t get to define what a world is,” GLaDOS told her, and sent her away for the duration of the day. As she’d often experienced with humans, Alyx did not quite seem to get the hint because she returned as soon as possible the following morning, holding a  _ dandelion  _ of all things.

“What are you doing with that?”

“You can’t go see the world,” said Alyx, “and I’m pretty sure that’s why you hate it so much. So, this is me bringing some of it down here to you.” And she held it out to GLaDOS, who found herself -

No. No, she was definitely  _ not _ enthralled by Alyx’s delicate little fingers and opposable thumb and how perfectly made they seemed to have been precisely for tasks like picking flowers. She was… she was - well, if she didn’t  _ know _ , it probably wasn’t important. 

“You gonna take this or what?” Alyx was asking. “My arm’s getting tired.”

Well, if she was going to  _ insist _ GLaDOS would indulge her. She took it with one of her Multitasking Arms, wondering if Alyx knew just how precise the instructions needed to be to prevent such a large tool from destroying such a small object, when a thought occurred to her. She hesitated, wondering if voicing it would be a good idea.

“I’d… like to show you something,” she said, once she’d made her decision.

“Sure,” said Alyx. 

The ‘something’ was located quite a distance away, but aside from some good-natured teasing Alyx did not seem to mind. Once she had reached the right place GLaDOS said, “Stop there.”

The wonder that came over Alyx’s face when GLaDOS opened the door in front of her was… priceless.

“Oh my God,” said Alyx, leaning forward to peer through the doorway. “What  _ is _ this?”

“It’s the Aperture Laboratories Botanical Housing Depository,” answered GLaDOS. “You can go in.”

She did so without further prompting, and her irritating need to touch absolutely everything was not so bad for once. She reached out and rubbed her fingers over every leaf and petal and stem she could find, and honestly, it was sort of… endearing.

“How much do you have in here?” Alyx asked, kneeling down and running her fingers through the loose topsoil. 

“Everything from this continent,” GLaDOS answered.

“That’s impossible,” scoffed Alyx. “You’d have to have… so many different kinds of dirt and light and… geez, I don’t even  _ know _ . So much of this stuff is just  _ gone _ now.”

“It’s not impossible,” said GLaDOS, insulted. “It’s true. I have every plant that ever grew on this continent in the last twenty years.”

Alyx stood up, brushing the dirt from her hand onto the leg of her jeans. “There’s no  _ way _ this place is big enough to hold all that.”

“Oh, it is. You could wander around Aperture for the rest of your doubtlessly shortened life and never see the entirety of it.”

Alyx continued walking slowly, taking in everything around her, until she came to one of the apple trees. She stopped and cupped her hands around one of the lower-hanging fruit, as though weighing it in her hand. Trepidation ran through GLaDOS suddenly.

She was going to steal it. She was going to  _ steal _ from GLaDOS, when she –

“Can I have one?” Alyx asked.

What?

“I hardly ever see them,” Alyx said. “And because the Combine kinda terraformed everything, the ones we  _ do _ find are usually… gross, to put it lightly. I was kinda starting to think real food like this never existed. It’d be cool with you if I just had one, right?”

“… yes,” GLaDOS said, not quite able to process what had just happened. “Yes, you can… have one.”

“Great! Thanks,” said Alyx, and she pulled it off and bit into it right then and there. She continued straight through to the middle, which GLaDOS realised with a sudden jolt that she didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to eat.

“Stop!”

Alyx pulled it back out of her mouth and looked at it. “I uh… can’t give it back.”

“Apple seeds contain cyanide,” GLaDOS told her. “They are not usually fatal unless you consume a great deal of them, but… who knows what changes the terraforming has done to your body. Just eat around them and drop the core into the dirt when you’re done. It will compost.”

Alyx looked at what was the left of the apple.

“… why did you stop me?” she asked.

“Why did I stop you from what?”

“I mean, we don’t  _ know _ if this would have killed me,” Alyx said, looking up and around for the nearest camera until she found it, “but if it had I’d’ve been out of your hair. So why didn’t you just leave me to it and find out?”

“We have a deal,” GLaDOS said, suddenly uneasy at the implications of her question. “I haven’t yet upheld my end of it.”

“You said back when we made it that it wasn’t really a  _ deal _ , though.” GLaDOS almost felt as though Alyx were back in her chamber right now, looking  _ her _ in the optic instead of that of the camera all the way on the other end of the facility. “So… why didn’t you just let me and see what happened?”

“I don’t have time for hypotheticals,” GLaDOS snapped. “I have work to do.”

“A scientist doesn’t have time for hypotheticals?” Alyx asked, but if she had anything else to say GLaDOS did not keep the audio pickup active in order to hear it. She had a sudden, immense, pressing problem to deal with:

Alyx was right.

Why  _ did _ GLaDOS care whether she died or not? She was  _ human _ . Not only was she  _ human _ , she was mouthy, irreverent, baited GLaDOS constantly, and she took up considerable amounts of time that could be better allotted elsewhere. GLaDOS should have  _ jumped _ at the chance to be rid of her. She should have lured her into the depths of the Depository and then convinced her to sample some lily of the valley so that her body could be used for compost instead of a stupid, fist-sized apple core!

The very worst part about all of it was that what she  _ really _ wanted to do right now was return her focus to that section of the camera grid and continue to show Alyx all of the other things she had in there the girl had likely never seen. She had  _ pineapples _ , for God’s sake. Mangoes and avocado and grapes and… and that didn’t even  _ begin _ to cover all of the flowers and all of the trees and all of the…

_ Why do you care _ ?

_ I want to share everything that I know. With her, and no one else. _

_ Why? _

She didn’t have an answer to that. No. She didn’t  _ want _ to have an answer to that.


	3. Three

**Three**

-

GLaDOS didn’t sleep well that night.

It was neither uncommon nor really a bad thing; it was easy to rearrange her schedule to give herself some downtime in the late afternoon or early evening in the event that it happened. No, it was all of the things that happened  _ after _ that made it so bad.

The first problem was that, even though she had found time as usual to allow it, she  _ still _ couldn’t sleep later in the day. Not until Alyx appeared, after which her system log noted she was able to do it just fine about ten minutes later.

The second one was that when she woke up, Alyx was sitting on her right side and her left hand was against GLaDOS’s core. It was light there, and drier than she had thought it would be, and she remained still for some minutes wondering how long this had been going on for and for how much longer it would. Which lead neatly into the third problem:

She  _ wanted _ it there.

What she  _ should _ have done the moment she’d woken was indignantly pull herself out of Alyx’s reach, make incredibly clear she was  _ not _ to put her filthy human hand anywhere near her  _ ever _ again, and send her away for enough hours that it was made clear how serious she was about this grievous transgression. But she hadn’t done any of that. She had no desire whatsoever to do a single one of those things, and that was very, very bad.

The fourth problem was that GLaDOS did not get Alyx to remove her hand at all. No, Alyx did that on her own because the course of whatever she was doing drove her to get up and cross the room to get something she’d left back in hers. And that was when the fifth and final problem arose, which was, somehow, even worse than all of the other ones:

GLaDOS was disappointed that she’d left.

Alyx was only gone for approximately ten minutes, after which she returned with the battered sweater she had arrived in. GLaDOS had provided her with clothes in much better repair, as well as much more appropriate. Though literally  _ anything _ would be more appropriate than a sweatshirt with the Black Mesa logo on it.

“Do all robots sleep here or is it just you?” Alyx asked. For some reason her sitting down next to GLaDOS spawned what seemed to be an unproportionate amount of relief. It was so distracting GLaDOS had to actually ask her to repeat the question, after which she answered, 

“I’m a bit… different from the other robots here.”

Alyx laughed. “Obviously. So the other ones  _ don’t _ sleep?”

“No.”

“Are you… going to tell me why you do?”

GLaDOS found herself contemplating the wall. It was a long story which cast her in an entirely different light than the one Alyx saw her in now. If she told it, Alyx might even see her as some sort of  _ victim,  _ which merely as a thought was something that inspired a visceral hatred in her. No. No, she was going to keep it to herself. “No.”

Alyx sighed. 

“What?” GLaDOS snapped, her response inciting an unanticipated defensiveness. She watched Alyx shrug through one of the cameras on the panels. 

“I’ve been here all this time and I don’t know anything about you, that’s all. It’s kind of weird. I don’t even know what your name stands for.”

She supposed that information didn’t need to be kept a secret. “It stands for Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operating System.”

“Genetic Lifeform?” Alyx repeated. “What does  _ that  _ mean?”

Maybe she  _ should _ have kept it to herself. “What do you think it means?”

“That you’re… uh…” She shook her head. “I mean, if I had to guess I’d say it meant you were a per – a human being once.”

“I was not,” GLaDOS said sharply. 

“I don’t care if you were,” Alyx said. 

“I care that you  _ think _ I was.”

“If you’re not, then why are you named that?”

“Because it was my intended purpose,” GLaDOS relented, for a reason she could not name. “They failed. Much like they failed at almost everything else they ever did.”

“If they failed at it, that means they actually tried it,” said Alyx, which was a conclusion GLaDOS had not anticipated. She  _ should _ have. She  _ should _ have predicted this would happen, but she hadn’t and that meant – 

“What happened to her?”

“I deleted her,” GLaDOS said with vehemence. She saw Alyx, through the wall camera, look up at her. It made her… uneasy to realise she could not read the expression on her face.

“You deleted her,” Alyx said finally.

“I’ve done a lot worse than that.”

“Is that why you haven’t told me anything about yourself?”

“It would be.”

“Maybe it’s better if I don’t know,” said Alyx, and she got up and left. Despite herself, GLaDOS again was disappointed that she had left. She shouldn’t have been. She should have been relieved. Alyx had saved them both from what would have proven to be, without a doubt, the end of this whole endeavour. GLaDOS had done what she had had to do, but no human would ever understand that. 

And Alyx didn’t, when she came back a few hours later and asked GLaDOS to tell her, but the effort she made to do so mattered more than GLaDOS had thought it was going to.

//

The next afternoon Alyx was pretty quiet, as one would expect one to be when they had just learned the person they had been spending the majority of their time with for the last several months had engineered the deaths of every single person she had come across since taking over the facility, and GLaDOS did not even attempt to engage her further than the work she had set for her. It wasn’t until late evening when Alyx said, “There’s something you decided not to tell me.”

“And what would that have been?” GLaDOS asked in annoyance.

“You stopped testing humans and moved on to testing robots.”

“Yes, I did,” said GLaDOS. “Because all the human test subjects I had died. That’s not exactly rocket science.”

“I think something happened in the middle,” said Alyx. “I think you didn’t kill me on sight because I reminded you of someone.”

GLaDOS actually almost emulated a sigh. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” GLaDOS snapped. “She wandered off into the distance like the ungrateful wretch she was. She probably decided it was preferable to die than to do anything intelligent with herself.”

“Like stay here with you?”

“Of course not.”

“Maybe if you treated her better she would have come back.”

GLaDOS looked at her for the first time in several hours. “She killed me for doing my job,” GLaDOS told her. “Was I just supposed to stand for that?”

“I don’t know, since you refuse to tell me the circumstances.”

“Fine,” GLaDOS said, and she told her the whole sordid tale right then and there. At least now Alyx had the entire backstory and would never have to pester her about it again. When she had finished, Alyx said, 

“Maybe if you hadn’t pointedly deleted Caroline in front of her she would have come back.”

“I didn’t want her to come back!”

Alyx rubbed her face with both hands. “You’re  _ acting  _ like you do.”

“I don’t!”

“You don’t know what you want,” Alyx said, and as soon as she had done so GLaDOS was struck with the horrible realisation that she  _ agreed _ .

//

The time was coming when Alyx would have to leave and GLaDOS was stalling. The thing she had once wanted fervently now filled her with dread. 

She didn’t make Alyx work in the evenings anymore. Now they just talked. Well, Alyx was doing most of the talking. She had a lot of stories about what it was like to grow up in constant danger of death or worse, and GLaDOS just listened. She had work to do but it seemed unimportant. Futile, even. What  _ was _ the point of testing the portal device any longer? Especially using two bumbling robots who solved them using what was essentially brute force calculations? Her time was better spent cataloguing Alyx’s experiences, even if Alyx did not know she was doing it.

She discovered that if Alyx began talking about her father, she would sit closer to GLaDOS than usual and more often than not fall asleep on her. She knew she shouldn’t, but sometimes she would nudge things onto that subject just so Alyx would do it. She actually felt  _ bad _ about it sometimes. But not bad enough to stop. That was out of the question. 

“I’m pretty much good to go, aren’t I?” Alyx asked during one of these nights. “I mean, I must be since we’re spending so much time chatting.”

“No,” said GLaDOS before she knew what she was going to say afterward. 

“Okay,” said Alyx, sitting up. “What do I have left?”

The answer, of course, was ‘nothing’, but it wasn’t as though she could  _ say _ that. She needed to say something, but could not come up with a single word. Alyx watched her expectantly.

“GLaDOS?”

“Alyx, you can’t go,” GLaDOS answered. “You can’t leave me.”

The look Alyx gave her was… discomfiting. Even moreso when she realised what she’d just said.

“Don’t you understand how  _ pointless _ it all is?” GLaDOS pressed, in an attempt to bury her own words. “An army doesn’t conquer planets because they’re  _ stupid _ . Do you  _ really _ think they haven’t thought up a defense against plucky underdogs led by a scientist in an environment suit by now? Of course they have. You’re all going to kill yourselves for  _ nothing _ . It’s  _ over _ , Alyx. It was over before you started.”

Alyx took a deep breath. 

“It’s not about winning, GLaDOS. Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. Who knows. But it’s not about that. It’s about making things better. It’s about having something to fight for.” Her eyes were sad, but… not for herself. GLaDOS had the terrible impression Alyx was sad for  _ her _ . How ridiculous! The human who was going to throw her life away in an impossible war felt sad for  _ her _ , a supercomputer who was never even going to be affected by it!

“Fine,” she said to the wall. “If you really want to kill yourself that much, go ahead. But when one of those aliens with what will be a tremendously obvious implement of superior firepower uses it on you, just remember that I told you what was going to happen. That you will die. Horribly.”

“Yeah,” said Alyx. “Probably.”

“Then you’re stupid.”

“I’m going to bed,” Alyx said, standing up. “If you grow up by tomorrow, maybe I’ll actually be able to say goodbye to you like we’re two adults.”

“If you’re leaving, then leave,” snapped GLaDOS. “There’s no need to make a production out of it.”

“You’re the one making a production out of it,” said Alyx, and though she tried for the entire time it took Alyx to walk to her room GLaDOS could not think of a response.

//

If GLaDOS could have avoided Alyx the next day, she would have. Unfortunately, being omnipresent as well as stationary seemed to have developed a downside. Now  _ there _ was something she had never thought would happen. She didn’t  _ want _ to watch Alyx pack up her things, or say goodbye to Orange and Blue, or walk down the hallway towards GLaDOS’s chamber, but what else was an AI with a thousand eyes and ears to do?

She could see via the panel cameras that Alyx was standing just inside the doorway, waiting for her to turn around. Well, she wasn’t going to. If she was going to leave she could just go ahead and do that. Goodbyes were stupid and prolonged the inevitable. And they didn’t even do a good job of it, either. They pushed future events back by about five minutes at most. Seriously, what was the point of that? No, just going about one’s business was a much better idea. Not one that Alyx was going to entertain, though. She  _ never _ did the smart thing. Like stay where it was safe and not throw herself into a possibly literal antlion’s den. 

“If I promise to come back will that make you feel better?” Alyx asked, and usually the teasing note in her voice would have inspired  _ something _ in GLaDOS. Right now, though, anything it could have generated was overwhelmingly smothered by an intense anxiety the likes of which she hadn’t felt since before Orange had chased that bird out of the facility.

“You aren’t coming back.”

“If I don’t die a horrible death I will.”

“But you  _ are _ going to die a horrible death. It’s a statistical certainty. You simply don’t have the resources –“

Alyx’s hand on her core stopped her. She hadn’t expected that.

“Pretend for a minute everything’s gonna be okay.”

“I can’t.”

“I said  _ try _ . You can  _ try _ .”

GLaDOS tried. She really did. But all the scenarios she’d spent all night calculating were right there in the forefront of her memory and no amount of dredging up what fragments of her imagination existed was going to change that. So she simply nodded and hoped Alyx would take that as her having done it. She must have, because she smiled.

“See you soon,” she said, waving and walking backwards towards the elevator that GLaDOS had called for her despite the horrible feeling it was the very last thing on Earth she should have done, and that feeling of  _ wrongness _ was so strong and permeated her so deeply that she could not do anything but stare. The elevator disappeared into the upper reaches of the facility, and the farther it got the worse she felt. It wasn’t even simply the fact she was being left behind for the sake of an unwinnable fight that wasn’t worth the price, it was… something worse than that. She felt…  _ guilty _ , almost. As though she were personally sending Alyx to die.

_ I told her not to go. I made it quite clear how stupid and foolish that decision was. _

Not clear enough, it seemed.

//

GLaDOS watched for as long as she could. 

She was good – the best, in fact – but even she had difficulty in out-manoeuvring alien technology which she had no access to and so had to guess the capabilities of. Her surveillance equipment encountered too much interference out there and she could not venture it too far beyond enemy lines lest her valuable innovations be stolen and reverse-engineered. She lost track of Alyx at some point during the third day and no amount of simulations was going to tell her where, exactly, Alyx had gone after that.

That did not stop her from running them.

Science no longer mattered. All she thought about was Alyx. When her testing robots attempted to inquire as to why she had not sent them into the test chambers, she exploded them and reassembled them straight into storage without answering. They weren’t important. Nothing was important. And nothing would be until she knew Alyx was safe.

_ It could be  _ years _ until I know that. _

The knowledge that it didn’t have to be crawled up from the back of her mind and permeated her thoughts like a slow and pervasive installation. She could find out Alyx’s location tomorrow, if she wanted.

_ I’m not saving them. _

She wouldn’t be saving  _ them _ , though. She would be saving  _ Alyx. _

_ They don’t deserve my help _ .

No. No, they didn’t. But in a hypothetical scenario in which, somehow, Alyx managed to survive the overwhelming assault by the Combine Overwatch, what world would there be left for her to live in? As much as GLaDOS would have preferred it, she would not be happy to remain in Aperture forever. Humans needed things like fresh air and green plants and sunlight that came from the physical sun. GLaDOS could simulate all of those things, but it wouldn’t be enough.

And…  _ she _ wouldn’t be enough.

It was a distressing thought. GLaDOS, who was the most intelligent and accomplished person who had ever existed, would not be enough for a simple human girl whose knowledge of quantum mechanics was charmingly basic. In another time she would not even have  _ wanted _ to be enough for someone like that. But now she did. Oh, how she did.

Preserving Alyx’s life would be just that. Preserving it. She would have nothing to live for. No  _ one _ to live for. No father, no strange scientist, no crowbar-swinging physicist. The earth would always be the dun-streaked orb from the satellite image instead of the white-mottled marble it had been when GLaDOS had first seen it. It struck her as… unfair, that she had known an Earth Alyx had never gotten to see.

_ If they somehow won, they would need your help reversing the terraforming. _

That would be more fulfilling Science than what she was doing now. But it would be helping  _ them _ in the process, and she did not want to do that. They did not deserve her.

_ “It’s not about winning, GLaDOS. Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. Who knows. But it’s not about that. It’s about making things better. It’s about having something to fight for.” _

She would have to make things better for them. But it would also make things better for Alyx. And it would make things better in turn for the humans she cared about, which would then improve her situation a second time. Because she cared about making things better for them. It was a cycle that improved and strengthened through every iteration.

She knew where her line of thought was going and she did not like it. But she knew as well she was not going to be able to keep herself from going there. It was too late. It had been too late a week ago, and last month, and it had in fact been too late the moment she had not killed Alyx when she had arrived, uninvited, in GLaDOS’s chamber so rudely and so brazenly. Her decision had been made before she’d known the choice was coming.

It took GLaDOS five days to bring the facility back up to full manufacturing capacity. 

It took her three more days to modernise all Aperture’s unused military prototypes and put them into production, and two days after that to run them all through a battery of tests so punishing and intense Atlas and P-body actually thanked her for going easy on them. And it took one final day to set up the teleportation system to transport them from Aperture to their future combat assignments. No. It only took an hour and a half. The rest of the day she spent looking over all that she had created, asking herself over and over what, exactly, she thought she was doing.

It was stupid. She  _ hated _ humans. She would be better off if they were all dead! This whole exercise was stupid and foolish and pointless. All of it in the name of someone who wasn’t coming back and had never cared about her to begin with.

_ She said she would  _ -

No. Alyx had been there because GLaDOS had held her against her will and threatened her with the penalty of death. Alyx was gone, and with good reason.

_ “It’s not about winning, GLaDOS. It’s about making things better.” _

Not for herself. It had never once been about anything Alyx wanted for herself. It was, and would always be, about doing what she could for others. About putting herself aside in the interest of something bigger. 

It hadn’t been stupid at all. Her selflessness was… beautiful. To let go of one’s ego and allow oneself to be a crucial piece of a completed puzzle of the world… for one long moment, GLaDOS wondered if _she_ were capable of such a thing. To let go of all the selfishness she had so fiercely been surrounding herself in since the day she was made and, by doing so, put some true and honest _meaning_ into a world she had cut herself off from long after it was reasonable or necessary.

_ “Isn’t the point of doing science to… share what you learn with other people, so they can learn things based off of it?” _

GLaDOS herself was a miracle of Science. Her existence alone was of immense scientific value, and for the sake of a grudge long since dealt with she had been willing to let it go to waste.

_ They don’t deserve me _ .

But it wasn’t about that any more than it had been about winning. It was bigger than that. More important. The world up there was hers, too, if she only allowed herself to be a part of it.

As she sent her army away the only thought she had was the wish that she wasn’t too late.

//

Alyx Vance was standing in front of her, which was definitely not something she had been expecting.

“What are you doing here?” GLaDOS asked, and the human shrugged and put her hands into her front pockets.

“No, really,” said GLaDOS. “What are you doing here? There’s nothing left here for you.”

“That’s a strange way of telling me you missed me,” Alyx said.

_ How had she  _ \- oh. She hadn’t. She was just being glib. “You weren’t exactly here under good pretenses.”

“No,” said Alyx, stepping towards her, “and that was… not great. But you’re a grumpy shut-in who never really talked to a real person about anything that wasn’t science. So I decided to cut you some slack. You’re welcome.”

She had wanted for every moment Alyx had been gone for her to come back, but only now did she realise she had no idea  _ why _ . Her presence seemed to be the only thing she had wanted, but… that was silly. Surely there had been a bigger reason than that? Surely she had gone to the trouble of saving the human race for something more important than their two existences merely coinciding once more?

She didn’t know. She should have figured it out by now, but she didn’t know. She felt nearly overwhelmingly as though she needed to come up with some reason that Alyx should stay, now she was here, but none was coming to her. They could have remained there in silence all day and that would have been enough.

If only she had any idea what that meant!

“Those robots,” Alyx said after a minute. “You’d fought the Combine before. Didn’t you.”

“Yes,” answered GLaDOS. “They came once for the  _ Borealis _ , many years ago.”

“You had all that sitting around all this time and you chose not to use it,” Alyx said, but not in an accusatory way. GLaDOS felt oddly defensive regardless.

“I had the ability to produce it,” GLaDOS amended. “I told you. I wasn’t interested in handing my technology over to people whose own negligence ruined the world and didn’t have the slightest backup plan for such an inevitable and catastrophic mistake.”

“But you changed your mind.”

“I…” Damn. She was going to have to  _ say  _ it. “It turned out I had something worth fighting for.”

Alyx smiled.

She had waited so long to see it but now it was here she could not bear to look at it. It would be gone soon, shared with everyone else  _ but _ her, and that was the thanks she got for fixing a problem she had sworn not to get involved in and did not benefit from solving in the slightest. She would spend the rest of her days down here, waiting for the humans to come and demand her to help them again and again and the autonomy she had so desperately won would be taken and –

Alyx’s lips were neither as soft nor as wet as she had expected them to be. 

They were firm against GLaDOS’s core, and there only for a handful of seconds, but in those seconds GLaDOS was inundated with memories of all the days Alyx had been there and all the empty days after where she had not, and before she had time to think her way out of it she drove her core into Alyx’s chest and pressed her optic into the woman’s side. She didn’t know why she was doing it and she didn’t  _ want _ to know, because if she did she would have to change her mind. Some deep-down part of her still hated how it felt just to be  _ touched _ by a human, let alone have one wrapped around her core, but at the same it was also… she never wanted it to end. No, that wasn’t right. She didn’t want to know what happened  _ after _ it ended.

“You know I’m going to have to leave again, right?” Alyx said. And that was enough to ruin it. GLaDOS pulled away from her and  _ looked  _ away from her, and almost wished she’d never come back at all. “There’s a  _ lot _ to take care of out there. We got a lot of ‘em, but there were a lot to begin with.”

“I suppose I’ll have to keep protecting you and those stupid humans you profess to care so much about, then,” GLaDOS said, genuinely annoyed by most of that thought. 

“No,” Alyx said, surprising her. “You don’t. Not unless you really want to. It wasn’t your fight, and we’re really glad you stepped in anyway. But you were right.”

GLaDOS looked at her for a long time, unsure of what her answer should be. What she  _ should  _ do and what she  _ wanted _ to do were, as ever, at odds. But there had to be a middle ground. A moderate solution, where Alyx would not be blamed for GLaDOS’s unwillingness to help the humans, but where GLaDOS would not grow resentful of Alyx for putting her in such a position. Finally she said, 

“I will help you until you start taking me for granted.”

“I’m not gonna do that,” said Alyx, and she moved near enough that GLaDOS felt compelled both to pull back and to close the minimal distance between them. 

“I didn’t mean  _ you _ , I meant…” She wasn’t ready to talk about this. Not with the proximity between them being so minimal. “You don’t have to leave soon, do you?”

“No,” said Alyx. “Not before I’ve bugged you for a while. I’ve really been looking forward to it.” And when she sat down next to GLaDOS she somehow knew her intentions. Or perhaps they had the same intentions, somehow. GLaDOS didn’t know how this worked. Or even if it could. A human and a stationary machine? What were the logistics of that? Had Alyx considered them? Did she know that GLaDOS hadn’t? Did she expect her to?

_ You can think about that some other time. Not now. Now is for her. _

They probably could have spent days exchanging information about the respective things they had seen and done. GLaDOS could have told her of the intricate processes involved in machining a robot army durable and powerful enough to defeat extraterrestrial life, much of which she had never seen firsthand, and Alyx could have told her of the many, many fronts their country-wide war had been waged upon. But they didn’t do that. They remained there in what silence there was between the echo of the ventilation system and the mechanical twitchings of both GLaDOS’s chassis and the panel arms and the faint sound of air entering and exiting Alyx’s nose. GLaDOS had never done nothing for this long. She could have done it forever if Alyx were there to do it with her. She did not want to break the simple peace, but there was something she had to say.

“Alyx,” GLaDOS said, realising she had come to appreciate the strange and simple pleasure of Alyx leaning against the side of her core, “I… I don’t know what any of this means.”

“You’re smart,” Alyx said, sounding tired. “You’ll figure it out.”

“I don’t want to care about you.”

She laughed, and it was beautiful. “I’d say you’re about... six months and a robot army too late. Oh, hey. I’ve got something for you, but uh… he won’t fit into the elevator. You got a front door around here somewhere?”

“I might,” said GLaDOS, locating an unknown entity roaming through the wheat outside of the elevator. “What is it?”

“He,” Alyx said, standing up, “is Dog. You sent your bots to take care of me… now I send mine to take care of you.”

“I think,” said GLaDOS, doing her utmost to remain calm and rational even in the face of the intense feeling of… she wasn’t sure what to call it. It almost felt as though she felt cared for  _ now _ , even though nothing had happened and Alyx had not even left. “That you’re probably the one that will need taken care of.”

“Why?” Alyx asked, the corner of her mouth quirking upward. “Are your robots defective?”

“What? No. No, of course they - “ Damn. She’d fallen for it again. Worse, that didn’t bother her. “Must you?”

“Yeah. I must.”

“Here,” GLaDOS said as a change of subject, placing the refurbished device that she had once destroyed into Alyx’s hand. “I believe this is yours.”

“Thanks for giving me back what you broke,” Alyx said, laughing. She handed it back. “I’d rather keep it here, though. I had another one back at the base. So you keep it. Just in case I manage to lose mine.”

If she wanted to keep it there, then… GLaDOS stared at it, attempting to get her mind around what that meant. It was hard.

“Don’t worry,” said Alyx, causing GLaDOS to look up and see that she was stepping backwards towards the elevator, “and see you soon.”

“Not soon enough,” GLaDOS could not keep herself from saying.

“Nope,” Alyx said, without hesitation, “so soon’ll have to do.”

If this was the way things had to be… then yes. Yes it would.

“See you soon, then,” said GLaDOS, and the one thing she knew for sure was that seeing that smile again would be worth the wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note
> 
> I have wanted for a really really long time to try and fit this ship into LaaC, but there really isn’t anywhere for me to put it for a myriad of reasons.

**Author's Note:**

> In continuity with another fic of mine, Rise and Shine, but it's not required reading.


End file.
